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REVIEW OF THE MONTH

Empire and Multitude


SAMIR AMIN

Post-Imperialist Empire or Renewed Expansion of Imperialism?


Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have chosen to call the current
global system “Empire.”* Their choice of that term is intended to dis-
tinguish its essential constituent characteristics from those that define
“imperialism.” Imperialism in this definition is reduced to its strictly
political dimension, i.e., the extension of the formal power of a state
beyond its own borders, thereby confusing imperialism with colonial-
ism. Colonialism therefore no longer exists, neither does imperialism.
This hollow proposition panders to the common American ideological
discourse according to which the United States, in contrast to the
European states, never aspired to form a colonial empire for its own ben-
efit and thus could never have been “imperialist” (and thus is not today
anymore than yesterday, as Bush reminds us). The historical materialist
tradition proposes a very different analysis of the modern world, cen-
tered on identification of the requirements for the accumulation of cap-
ital, particularly of its dominant segments. Taken to the global level, this
analysis thus makes it possible to discover the mechanisms that produce
the polarization of wealth and power and construct the political econo-
my of imperialism.
*Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2000) and Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin,
2004). These authors do not directly take up a great number of fundamental issues of
“what is new” in capitalism, such as those concerning “cognitive” or financial capitalism,
the organization of work and production, and geopolitics. I want to make clear that I do
not reproach them for that, but only for having drawn unwarranted conclusions in sup-
port of their ideas from these unexamined new developments. Very different readings of
the transformations in question exist that I will discuss on other occasions. Empire was
written before September 11, 2001, which does not justify in any way Hardt and Negri’s
acceptance of Washington’s vulgar propaganda discourse, claiming that it intervenes
only at popular request, for humanitarian reasons, for the defense of democracy—with-
out the least consideration of self-serving material interests!
Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His recent books
include The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World
(Monthly Review, 2004) and Beyond US Hegemony forthcoming from Zed Books.
This essay was translated from the French by James H. Membrez.
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Hardt and Negri studiously ignore every analysis that has been writ-
ten in this regard, not only by Marxists but also by other schools of polit-
ical economy. Instead, they take up the legalism of a Maruice Duverger
or the vulgar political science of Anglo-Saxon empiricism. Thus “imperi-
alism” becomes a common characteristic shared across space and time
by various “Empires,” such as the Roman, Ottoman, British or French
colonial, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Soviet. The inevitable collapse
of these empires is related to “analogous causes.” This is much closer to
a superficial journalism than to any serious reading of history. But again,
they pander to the current fashion (after “the fall of the Berlin Wall”).
There is no question that the evolution of capitalism and the world
system in the course of the last twenty years has involved qualitative
transformations in all areas. It is another thing to subscribe to the dom-
inant discourse according to which the “scientific and technological”
revolution will, by itself, produce forms of economic and political man-
agement of the planet that “surpass” those associated, until recently,
with the defense of “national interests” and, further, that this evolution
would be “positive.” This discourse proceeds on the basis of serious sim-
plifications. The dominant segments of capital indeed operate in the
transnational space of world capitalism, but control of these segments
remains in the hands of financial groups still strongly “national” (i.e.,
based in the United States or Great Britain or Germany, but not yet in a
“Europe” that does not exist as such on this level). Moreover, the eco-
nomic reproduction of the system is, today as yesterday, unthinkable
without the parallel implementation of the “politics” that modulate its
variants. The capitalist economy does not exist without a “state,” except
in the ideological and empty vulgate of liberalism. There is still no
transnational, “world” state. The true questions, evaded by the domi-
nant discourse of globalization, concern the contradictions between the
logics of the globalized accumulation of central capitalism’s dominant
segments (the “oligopolies”) and those governing the “politics” of the
system.
Hardt and Negri’s system, presented under the pleasant-sounding
term “Empire,” proceeds, then, from the naïve vision of globalization
offered by the dominant discourse. In this vision, transnationalization
has already abolished imperialism (and imperialism in conflict), replac-
ing it with a system in which the center is both nowhere and every-
where. The center/periphery opposition (that defines the imperialist
relation) is already “surpassed.” Hardt and Negri here take up the com-
monplace discourse in which, since there is a “first world” of “wealth”
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in the “third world” and a “third world” of poverty in the first, there is
no point in opposing the first and third worlds to each other. Certainly
there are wealthy and poor in India, just as in the United States, since
we all still live in class divided societies integrated into world capital-
ism. Does that mean that the social formations of India and the United
States are identical? Does the distinction between the active role of some
in shaping the world and the passive role of others, who can only
“adjust” to the requirements of the globalized system, have no meaning?
In reality, this distinction is more pertinent today than ever. In the ear-
lier phase of contemporary history (1945–1980), the relations of force
between the imperialist countries and the dominated countries were
such that the “development” of the peripheries was on the agenda, leav-
ing open the possibility for the latter to assert themselves as active
agents in the transformation of the world. Today these relations have
changed dramatically in favor of dominant capital. The discourse of
development has disappeared and been replaced by that of “adjust-
ment.” In other words, the current world system (the “Empire”) is not
less imperialist but more imperialist than its predecessor!
Hardt and Negri would have realized this if they had only taken note
of what the representatives of dominant capital have written. As incred-
ible as it may appear, they have not done that at all. However, all major
parts of the U.S. establishment (Democrats and Republicans) make no
secret of the objectives of their plan: to monopolize access to the plan-
et’s natural resources in order to continue their wasteful mode of life,
even if this is to the detriment of other peoples; to prevent any large or
mid-sized power from becoming a competitor capable of resisting
Washington’s orders; and to achieve these aims by military control of the
planet.
Hardt and Negri have simply taken up the current discourse in which,
“nationalism” and “communism” having been definitively defeated, the
return of a globalized liberalism constitutes objective progress. The
“insufficiencies” of the system, if there are any, can only be corrected
from within the logic of the system itself and not by combating it. Thus
it is easy to understand the reasons why Negri has joined the ranks of
Atlanticist Europe and called for supporting its project of an ultra-liber-
al constitution subservient to Washington. But the real history of
“nationalism” and “communism” has nothing in common with what lib-
eral propaganda says about it. The social transformations inspired by
nationalism and communism across three decades in the welfare state of
the western social democracies, in the countries of really existing social-
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ism, and in the experiences of radical national populism in the third


world forced capital to make adjustments to the social demands arising
from the logic of its own domination and pushed back the ambitions of
imperialism. These transformations were huge and largely positive
despite the limits imposed by the insufficiently radical character of the
projects in question. The (provisional) return of liberalism made possi-
ble by the erosion and then collapse of the projects from the preceding
period of contemporary history is not a “step forward,” but a dead end.
The true questions concerning the contemporary world can only be
formulated by abandoning Hardt and Negri’s liberal discourse.
Important and, of course, diverse theses have been produced on these
questions, among others from the perspective of a renewed historical
materialism, which Hardt and Negri ignore. I will be satisfied here with
recalling the broad outlines of the theses I have proposed on the subject.
In the past, imperialism appeared as the permanent conflict among the
imperialist powers (in the plural). The growing centralization of
oligopolistic capital has now given rise to the emergence of a “collective”
imperialism of the triad (the United States, Europe, and Japan). In this
respect, the dominant segments of capital share common interests in the
management of their profit from this new imperialist system. But the
unified political management of this system comes up against the plu-
rality of states. The contradictions within the triad have to do not with
the divergence of interests among the dominant oligopolistic capitals but
with the diversity of interests represented by the states. I have summa-
rized this contradiction in a phrase: the economy unites the partners of
the imperialist system, politics divide the nations concerned.
The Multitude—Constituting Democracy or Reproducing
Capital’s Hegemony?

The liberal ideology specific to capitalism places the individual in the


forefront. It does not matter that in its historical construction during the
Enlightenment the individual in question had to be an educated and
property-owning man, a bourgeois capable, as a result, of making free
use of Reason. This was an indestructible liberating advance. As a move-
ment beyond capitalism, socialism cannot be conceived of as a return to
the past, as a negation of the individual. Bourgeois democracy, despite
the narrow limits in which capitalism encloses it, is not “formal,” but
quite real, even if it remains incomplete. Socialism will be democratic or
it will not be. But I add to this phrase its necessary complement: there
will be no more democratic progress without calling capitalism into
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question. Democracy and social progress are inseparable. The really


existing socialisms of the past certainly did not respect this requirement
and thought they could achieve progress without democracy or with as
little democracy as in capitalism itself. But it is also necessary to add that
the great majority of democracy’s defenders today are hardly more
demanding and think that democracy is possible without any visible
social progress, let alone calling into question the principles of capital-
ism. Do Hardt and Negri leave this category of liberal democracy behind?
The individualist basis of liberal ideology establishes the individual
as the subject of history in the last resort. That assertion is not true, nei-
ther for the history of earlier systems (which by the Enlightenment def-
inition were unaware of the individual) nor even for the history of
capitalism, which is a system based on the conflict between classes, the
true subjects of this chapter of history. But the individual would be able
to become the subject of history in a future advanced socialism.
Hardt and Negri think that we have arrived at this historical turning
point, that classes (along with nations or peoples) are no longer the sub-
jects of history. Instead the individual has become such (or is in the pro-
cess of becoming such). This turning point gives rise to the formation of
what they call the “multitude,” defined in terms of the “totality of pro-
ductive and creative subjectivities.”
Why and how would this turning point occur? Hardt and Negri’s
texts are quite vague on these questions. They talk about the transition
to “cognitive capitalism” or the emergence of “immaterial production,”
the new “networked” society or “deterritorialization.” They make refer-
ence to Foucault’s propositions concerning the transition from the disci-
plinary society to the society of control. Everything that has been said
over the past thirty years, whether good or bad, depending on one’s
viewpoint, whether indisputable because platitudinous or strongly
debatable, is thrown pell-mell into a great pot in preparation for the
future. A compendium of current fashions does not easily lead to con-
viction. The similarity to the theses formulated by Manuel Castells con-
cerning the “networked society” and to the ideas popularized by Jeremy
Rifkin, Robert B. Reich, and other American popularizers is such that
one is entitled to pose the question: what is new and important in all this
hodgepodge of ideas?
I will propose then another hypothesis to account for the invention of
the “multitude” in question. Our moment is one of defeat for the pow-
erful social and political movements that shaped the twentieth century
(workers’, socialist, and national liberation movements). The loss of per-
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spective that any defeat involves leads to ephemeral unrest and the pro-
fusion of para-theoretical propositions that both legitimate that unrest
and give rise to the belief that it constitutes an “effective” means for
“transforming the world” (even without wanting to), in the good sense
of the term moreover. One can only gradually solidify new formulations
that are both coherent and effective by distancing oneself from the past,
rather than proposing a “remake” of it, and by effectively integrating
new realities produced by social evolution in all its dimensions. Such
contributions, both debatable and diverse, certainly exist. I do not
include Hardt and Negri’s discourse among them.
The propositions that Hardt and Negri draw from their discourse on
the “multitude” bear witness, even in their very formulation, to the
impasse in which they are trapped. The first of these propositions con-
cerns democracy that, for the first time in history, is supposedly on the
verge of becoming a real possibility on the global scale. Moreover, the
multitude is defined as the “constitutive” force of democracy. This is a
wonderfully naïve proposition. Are we moving in this direction? Beyond
a few superficial appearances (some elections here or there), which obvi-
ously satisfy the liberal powers (particularly Washington), democra-
cy—both necessary and possible—is in crisis. It is threatened with
losing its legitimacy to the advantage of religious or ethnic fundamen-
talisms (I do not consider the ethnocratic regimes of the former
Yugoslavia as democratic progress!). Do elections that overturn the
power of one criminal gang (for example, one in the service of the
Russian autocracy) to replace it with another one (financed by the CIA!)
constitute progress for democracy or a manipulated farce? Is not the
unfolding of the imperialist project for control of the planet at the origin
of the frontal attacks that are reducing basic democratic rights in the
United States? Is not the liberal consensus in Europe, around which the
major political forces of right and left have united, in the process of dele-
gitimizing electoral procedures? Hardt and Negri are silent on all these
questions.
The second proposition concerns the “diversity of the multitude.” But
the forms and contents that define the (diverse) components of the mul-
titude are barely specified any more than are the forces that produce
and/or reduce this diversity. Major contradictions consequently traverse
all of Hardt and Negri’s texts. For example, the current globalization,
according to them, is supposed to reduce the “differences” between cen-
ters and peripheries (otherwise this globalization would remain imperi-
alist). The real world is evolving in the exact opposite direction by
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accentuating “differences” and constructing apartheid on a world scale.


The diversity within the local components of the system cited by Hardt
and Negri (in fact only in North American and Western European soci-
eties) is itself of a “diverse” nature: there are (sometimes, as in the
United States) ethnic or para-ethnic “communities,” there are diverse
religious or linguistic regions, there are also classes, perhaps (!), that it
would be good to redefine on the basis of the transformation of social
realities! Even when all these diversities have been lined up, nothing
much has been said. How are they articulated with one another in the
production, reproduction, and transformation of social systems? It is
impossible to respond to these fundamental questions without concep-
tualizing what I call “political cultures.” There are serious and positive
contributions in these areas also. Certainly, they are debatable, but they
cannot be ignored. Hardt and Negri have contributed nothing here that
one can mention in support of their thesis.
The reversal establishing the individual as the subject of history and
the multitude as the constitutive force of its democratic project is an
“idealist” invention. It supposes that a reversal has occured in the world
of ideas without a transformation of real social relations. I am not sug-
gesting here that ideas are always only passive reflections of reality. I
have developed the opposite point of view, founded on the recognition
of the autonomy of “instances.” Ideas can be in advance of their time.
The question here does not concern this general proposition. It concerns
postmodernist ideas in vogue today (inclusive of the ideas of Hardt and
Negri themselves): are they in advance of their time? Or are they only the
naïve, confused, and contradictory expression of the reality of the
moment, a moment of defeat not yet surpassed? In these conditions the
“multitude” may become a constitutive reality of indecisive, various, and
disjointed “diversities.” It can take on the appearance of acting as a “real
force” (a strong electoral majority, for example). But this is no more than
ephemeral, destined to give way to a contradictory articulated structure,
as always in history. In several years, the page of the “multitude” will
probably have turned, as happened with the workerism (opéraïsme) of
the 1970s and for the same reason: the fixation on the partial and the
ephemeral, as noted by Atilio Boron in Empire and Imperialism (Zed
Books, 2005).
The political culture that stands out behind Hardt and Negri’s dis-
course is that of American liberalism. This political culture considers the
American Revolution and the Constitution adopted at that time as the
decisive event in the opening of modernity. Hannah Arendt, the inspira-
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tion for Hardt and Negri, writes that this revolution opens the era of the
“unlimited quest for political liberty.” Today, the emergence of the mul-
titude, the constitutive force of a democracy “possible for the first time
on the world scale,” crowns the (positive) victory of the
“Americanization of the world.”
The rallying to American liberalism is necessarily accompanied by the
devaluation of the different paths of other nations, in particular of “old
Europe,” as formulated by Hannah Arendt when she counterposed the
American Revolution to the “limited struggle against poverty and
inequality” to which she reduces the French Revolution. In the Cold War
era, all the great revolutions of modern times (French, Russian, and
Chinese) had to be denigrated. They were vitiated from the beginning by
their “totalitarian tendency,” according to the American liberal dis-
course that became the spearhead of the counterrevolution after the
Second World War. The exclusive survival of the “American model,”
whose pioneering revolution and constitution did not question any of
the necessities of capitalist development, implied that the heritage of
those revolutions that had indeed questioned capitalist exigencies (as
was the case beginning with the Jacobin radicalization of the French
Revolution) was repudiated. The denunciation of the French Revolution
(François Furet), banal anti-Sovietism, and the charges brought against
Maoism constitute some of the major planks of this counterrevolution in
political culture.
Now in this area Hardt and Negri remain utterly silent. They system-
atically ignore all the critical literature (a large part of it from the United
States, moreover) on the American Revolution that established a long
time ago that the Constitution of the United States was systematically
constructed to rule out all danger of a “popular” deviation. The success
in this sense is real, arousing the envy of all the European reactionaries
who never succeeded in doing it (Giscard d’Estaing said that the con-
stitution of the ultra-liberal European project was “as good” as the U.S.
Constitution!).
The “aspirations” of the multitude established as the constitutive
force of the future are reduced to very little: freedom, particularly to emi-
grate, and the right to a socially guaranteed income. In the undoubted
care not to venture outside what is permitted by American liberalism,
the project deliberately ignores everything that could be qualified as the
heritage of the workers’ and socialist movement, in particular the equal-
ity rejected by the political culture of the United States. It is difficult to
believe in the transformative power of an emerging global (and
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European) citizenship while the policies implemented fundamentally


deprive citizenship of its effectiveness.
The construction of a real alternative to the contemporary system of
globalized liberal capitalism involves other requirements, in particular
the recognition of the gigantic variety of needs and aspirations of the
popular classes throughout the world. In fact, Hardt and Negri experi-
ence much difficulty in imagining the societies of the periphery (85 per-
cent of the human population). The debates concerning the tactics and
strategy of building a democratic and progressive alternative that would
be effective in the concrete and specific conditions of the different coun-
tries and regions of the world never appear to have interested them.
Would the “democracy” promoted by the intervention of the United
States permit going beyond an electoral farce like the one in the Ukraine,
for example? Can one reduce the rights of the “poor” who people the
planet to the right to “emigrate” to the opulent West? A socially guaran-
teed income may be a justifiable demand. But can one have the naiveté
to believe that its adoption would abolish the capitalist relation, which
allows capital to employ labor (and, consequently, to exploit and
oppress it), to the advantage of the worker who would from that point
on be in a position to use capital freely and so be able to affirm the
potential of his or her creativity?
The reduction of the subject of history to the “individual” and the
uniting of such individuals into a “multitude” dispose of the true ques-
tions concerning the reconstruction of subjects of history equal to the
challenges of our era. One could point to many other important contri-
butions to oppose to the silence of Hardt and Negri on this subject.
Undoubtedly, historic socialisms and communisms had a tendency to
reduce the major subject of modern history to the “working class.”
Moreover, this is a reproach that could be leveled at the Negri of work-
erism. In counterpoint, I have proposed an analysis of the subject of his-
tory as formed from particular social blocs capable, in successive phases
of popular struggle, of effectively transforming the social relations of
force to the advantage of the dominated classes and peoples.
At the present time, to take up the challenge implies that one is mov-
ing forward in the formation of democratic, popular, and national hege-
monic blocs capable of overcoming the powers exercised by both the
hegemonic imperialist blocs and the hegemonic comprador blocs. The
formation of such blocs takes place in concrete conditions that are very
different from one country to another so that no general model (whether
in the style of the “multitude” or some other) makes sense. In this per-
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spective, the combination of democratic advances and social progress


will be part of the long transition to world socialism, just as the affir-
mation of the autonomy of peoples, nations, and states will make it
possible to substitute a negotiated globalization for the unilateral glob-
alization imposed by dominant capital (which Empire praises!) and
thus gradually deconstruct the current imperialist system. The deepen-
ing of debates on these real questions is, without a doubt, far more
promising than pursuing the examination of what the “multitude”
could be.
Is the Political Culture of Empire and Multitude Equal to the
Challenge?

The fashion today is “culturalism,” a vision of human plurality found-


ed on some supposed cultural invariants, particularly religious and eth-
nic. The development of “communitarianism” and the invitation to
recognize “multiculturalism” are the products of this vision of history.
Such a vision is not that of the historical materialist tradition, which
attempts to articulate the class struggles of modern times with the forms
and conditions of the participation of peoples affected by the system of
globalized capitalism. The analyses produced within the context of these
questions make it possible to understand the variety of paths traveled by
different nations and to identify the specificity of the contradictions that
exist within the societies in question and at the level of the global sys-
tem. These analyses, then, revolve around what I call the formation of
the political cultures of the peoples of the modern world.
The question I pose here concerns the political culture underlying the
writings of Hardt and Negri. Does it lie within the historical materialist
tradition or in that of culturalism? I proposed in my book The Liberal
Virus (Monthly Review Press, 2004) a reading of two itineraries
“European,” on the one hand, and American, on the other, forming the
political cultures of the peoples in question. I will only very briefly recall
the broad outlines of my argument here.
The formation of the political culture of the European continent is the
product of a succession of formative great moments: the Enlightenment
and invention of modernity; the French Revolution; the development of
the workers’ and socialist movement and the emergence of Marxism;
and the Russian Revolution. This succession of advances certainly did
not ensure that the successive “lefts” produced by these moments would
assume the political management of European societies. But it did form
the right/left contrast on the continent. The triumphant counterrevolu-
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R E V I E W O F T H E M O N T H 11

tion imposed restorations (after the French and Russian Revolutions), a


retreat from secularism, compromises with aristocracies and churches,
and challenges to liberal democracy. It successfully induced the peoples
concerned to support the imperialist projects of dominant capital and,
to this end, mobilized the chauvinistic nationalist ideologies that expe-
rienced their greatest glory on the eve of 1914.
The succession of moments constitutive of the political culture of the
United States is quite different. These moments are: the establishment in
New England of anti-Enlightenment Protestant sects; control of the
American Revolution by the colonial bourgeoisie, in particular by its
dominant slave-holding faction; the alliance of the people with that
bourgeoisie, founded on the expansion of the frontiers that, in turn, led
to the genocide of the Indians; and the succession of waves of immi-
grants that frustrated the maturation of a socialist political conscious-
ness and substituted “communitarianism” for it. This succession of
events is strongly marked by the permanent dominance of the right,
which made the United States the “surest” country for the unfolding of
capitalism.
Today one of the major battles that will decide the future of humani-
ty turns around the “Americanization” of Europe. Its objective is to
destroy the European cultural and political heritage and substitute for it
the one that is dominant in the United States. This ultra-reactionary
option is that of the dominant political forces in Europe today and has
found a perfect translation in the project of the European constitution.
The other battle is that between the “North” of dominant capital and the
“South,” the 85 percent of humanity who are the victims of the imperi-
alist project of the triad. Hardt and Negri ignore the stakes in these two
decisive battles.
The ill-considered praise that they make of American “democracy”
strongly contrasts with the writings of analysts critical of North
American society, rejected up front because their “anti-Americanism”
disqualifies them (in the eyes of whom? the American establishment?). I
will cite here only Anatol Lieven’s America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy
of American Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2004) whose conclu-
sions largely coincide with mine despite our different ideological and
scientific starting points. Lieven links the American democratic tradition
(the reality of which no one would contest) to the obscurantist origins
of the country (which is perpetuated and reproduced by successive
waves of immigrants). U.S. society in this respect ends up resembling
Pakistan much more than Great Britain. Further, the political culture of
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the United States is a product of the conquest of the West (which leads
to considering all other peoples as “redskins” who have the right to live
only on condition of not hindering the United States). The new imperi-
alist project of the U.S. ruling class requires a redoubling of an aggres-
sive nationalism, which henceforth becomes the dominant ideology and
recalls the Europe of 1914 rather than the Europe of today. On every level,
the United States is not “in advance” of “old Europe,” but a century
behind. This is why the “American model” is favored by the right and
unfortunately by segments of the left, including Hardt and Negri, who
have been won over to liberalism at the present time.
Beyond the two theses of Empire (“imperialism is outmoded”) and
Multitude (“the individual has become the subject of history”), Hardt
and Negri’s discourse exhibits a tone of resignation. There is no alterna-
tive to submission to the exigencies of the current phase of capitalist
development. One will only be able to combat its damaging conse-
quences by becoming integrated into it. This is the discourse of our
moment of defeat, a moment that has not yet been surpassed. This is the
discourse of social democracy won over to liberalism, of pro-Europeans
won over to Atlanticism. The renaissance of a left worthy of the name,
capable of inspiring and implementing progress for the benefit of the
people, requires a radical rupture with discourses of this type.

(continued from inside back cover)


tradition. Those interested in learning more about the Debs Foundation can go
to: www.eugenevdebs.com.

We were sad to learn of the death at age 87 of Alice Thorner, a long-time friend
of MR. Alice and her husband Daniel devoted their lives to critical engagement
with the development of modern India. The Thorners, like numerous other U.S.
radical activists and intellectuals, came under attack in the United States during
the McCarthy era of the 1950s. Called upon in 1952 to go before the U.S. Senate
inquisition, Daniel, then in India, refused to return to the United States and tes-
tify. As a result the Thorners were in effect political refugees from the United
States. For many years they divided their time between Paris, where they both
taught, and India. A full tribute to Alice by the noted Indian economist Utsa
Patnaik can be found in the commentary section of the MR Web site at
www.monthlyreview.org.

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